ECOSYSTEMIC RELATION 1)2)
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E. MORIN enunciated the following double principle about the interrelation between a system and an ecosystem which supports it: "The system responds by way of its own determinism to the randomness of the ecosystem while it responds in an aleatory way to the determinism of the ecosystem".
MORIN explains this apparent contradiction in the following terms:
"1. The system opposes its determinism to the randomness in the ecosystem.
"The self-organizing system creates his own zone of determinism: the difference between a similar agglomeration of cells when living or dead is that while the first one conforms an organism, a system obeying its own determinism, the other one obeys the physicochemical determinism of the surroundings.
"The living systems fight by multiple means the destructiveness immanent in the surroundings… they tend to reduce the external variations… (and) to impose their law, against external adverse conditions.
"a) The system tends to dampen variations of the external medium and imposes within itself its own constancies: this is homeostasis… The negative feedback is the well known regulator which contrasts the random perturbation and re-establish the homeostatic state wherever it has been affected.
"The "system produces a non-random response to a random event, at the very place of the circuit where the random event took place" (as quoted from G. BATESON, 1967).
"b) The system tends to impose its own determinism on the environment in spite of adverse conditions. This is equifinality, by which a finalized state of the system can be reached, starting from different initial conditions and by different ways.
"2. The system opposes a random variability to the environmental determinism.
This is already the reverse of the former proposition, in view that a system able to create a zone of proper finality (in its vicinity) escapes in this way from some effects of the external determinism" (1972, p.180).
Thus the system obviates many unfavorable environmental perturbations, while becoming capable to produce effects in its environment.
P. VENDRYES had already expressed similar ideas in his 1942 book "Vie et Probabilité".
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Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).
To cite this page, please use the following information:
Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]
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